Mosaic from Hosios Loukas Monastry, Greece, 11th C., and La Résurrection by Andrea Mantegna 15thC
Does a picture tell a thousand words? Does a metaphor matter? How much are our beliefs shaped by visual images?
Easter Sunday celebrates the Christian tradition of the resurrection of Jesus after his crucifixion and death. As Christianity developed to its present form, various artistic traditions imagined what the resurrection would have looked like, based on the descriptions of associated events in the bible (Roman guards, empty tomb, risen visions etc). During the first millennium Christianity developed two direct depictions of the resurrection moment (Easter), and they are utterly different from each other. Jesus lived, died and was presumably resurrected as a Jew, and the Christian identity only developed gradually from a Messianic Jewish sect during the first century. Jewish understanding of resurrection was very different from some modern Christian views. How would the earliest Christians have viewed the resurrection?
Join the Theology Discovery Group as we watch and base our discussion on a Zoom presentation from the Westar Institute* in which the engaging speaker, John Dominic Crossan**, talks through some of the concepts in the book “Resurrecting Easter: How the West Lost and the East Kept the Original Easter Vision”, which he co-authored with Sarah Crossan.
5:15pm for coffee for a 5:30pm start on Wednesday 14 April 2021, in the Wānanga Room & Lounge at Aldersgate. Further info from Hugh Mingard. Please bring some finger food to share if you are able.
* Westar Institute — home of the Jesus Seminar — is dedicated to fostering and communicating the results of cutting-edge scholarship on the history and evolution of the Christian tradition, thereby raising the level of public discourse about questions that matter in society and culture.
** John Dominic Crossan, co-Chair of the original Jesus Seminar and a prominent scholar of Christian history biblical studies, is an Irish-American biblical scholar with two post-doctoral diplomas in exegesis from Rome’s Pontifical Biblical Institute and in archeology from Jerusalem’s École Biblique. He has been a mendicant friar and a catholic priest and a President of the Society of Biblical Literature. His focus, whether scholarly or popular, whether in books, videos, or lectures, is on the historical Jesus as the norm and criterion for the entire Christian Bible. His reconstructed Jesus incarnates nonviolent resistance to the Romanization of his Jewish homeland and the Herodian commercialization of his Galilean lake as present program and future hope of a transformed world and transfigured earth.